Court Rules New York State Police Must Disclose Officer Names in Misconduct Records

The New York Civil Liberties Union and the New York State Police have been fighting for years over misconduct records that the state legislature made public in 2020.

A judge ruled Monday that the New York State Police (NYSP) must disclose the names of officers it redacted from two decades of misconduct complaints sought by the New York Civil Liberties Union (NYCLU).

Albany County Supreme Court Judge Julian Schriebman held that the NYSP couldn't apply a blanket privacy exemption to redact officers' names from a spreadsheet of misconduct investigations. The NYCLU won a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit in 2023 for NYSP misconduct records spanning from 2000 to 2020, but the department insisted on redacting officers' names, claiming that publishing the names of officers who were accused and cleared of wrongdoing would be an invasion of personal privacy.

Schriebman ruled that the department lacked a reasonable basis under New York's Freedom of Information Law (FOIL) for the blanket denial and ordered the NYSP to produce the unredacted records within 90 days, as well as pay attorney fees and costs to the NYCLU.

Bobby Hodgson, assistant legal director at the NYCLU, said obtaining officers' names is "vital to having any sort of a clear picture of [the NYSP's] system-wide disciplinary practices."

"We did an analysis of the material they gave us [in 2023], and there's a lot you can conclude from that about their practices," Hodgson says. "But without being able to see officer names, you can't take the next step. There are many analyses that you simply can't run because you can't see the direct connection between incidents involving the same officers."

The ruling is the latest in a years-long legal fight between the NYCLU and the NYSP—and a decades-long tug-of-war between New York police departments and transparency advocates in general over whether the public has the right to see police misconduct complaints, investigations, and disciplinary records.

In 2020, the New York Legislature repealed Section 50-a of the state's civil rights law, a statute that police departments relied on for four decades to keep disciplinary records and other police files secret. Police unions had successfully expanded the scope of the law to thwart reporters, civil liberties groups, and families of people killed by police from discovering nearly anything about officers' history. A 2018 report by the New York City Bar Association concluded that 50-a "has been interpreted so broadly that police misconduct in New York State is more secretive than any other state in the nation."

But even after Section 50-a was repealed, those misconduct records remained hidden in many jurisdictions due to ceaseless stonewalling and litigation by New York police departments and unions.

The NYCLU launched more than a dozen different FOIL lawsuits against state and local law enforcement agencies for their misconduct records following the repeal of Section 50-a, including a suit against the New York State Police in 2022 after the department refused to turn over most of the records the NYCLU sought.

A 2023 NYCLU report based on the NYSP spreadsheet that the agency was forced to disclose, sans officers' names, found that internal affairs investigators "verified misconduct allegations at very low rates when an officer was accused of misconduct involving a civilian, like unlawful searches, use-of-force, or discrimination." 

And when misconduct was substantiated, the report said, "only a fraction of verified misconduct investigations triggered serious disciplinary action. Most officers received a slap on the wrist."

News investigations came to similar conclusions. When the NYSP refused to hand over disciplinary records to two reporters from The Buffalo News, the reporters instead got them from a local district attorney's office. The records showed that troopers were rarely fired, even for conduct like interfering with investigations, drunk driving, and intentionally crushing a man's eyeglasses.

Buffalo's ABC 7 News also obtained New York State Police misconduct records from a local district attorney. Those records revealed light punishments, such as a trooper who "took pictures in his State Police uniform with his genitalia exposed, losing five vacation days in 2008 and had sex on the job two years later, leading to an eight day suspension."

Today, five years after Section 50-a was repealed, Hodgson says the NYCLU still has between a dozen and 20 active public records lawsuits across the state regarding misconduct records.

Most of the cases that have concluded have gone in favor of transparency. In February, the New York Court of Appeals, the state's highest court, ruled that the Rochester Police Department must turn over all of its records related to police discipline and misconduct allegations, regardless of whether the complaints were substantiated or resulted in discipline.

Hodgson says that police departments' attempts to keep these records hidden ignore lawmakers' clear intent when they repealed Section 50-a.

"This is some of the core of what the legislature said," Hodgson argues. "People are entitled to know if a particular officer employed by the state has been accused of misconduct, what type of misconduct and when, and what happened to them."

A spokesperson for the NYSP said the agency is reviewing the ruling and declined to comment further.